gyomu

The original iPad had a 9.7" screen; it was later bumped to 10.2", and today the smallest iPad/iPad Air screen is 11".

The iPad Mini started with a 7.9" screen, bumped today to 8.5".

The iPhone Duo inner display is 7.6", there are already rumors saying a gen 2 or gen 3 might be 7.9".

It's interesting how smooth the iPhone/iPad continuum is becoming.

> After 3 hours I was just exhausted from watching these peoples' tortuous attempts to avoid giving a direct answer to any question.

I’ve been around a lot of bullshitters my whole life, and my immediate reaction is to go “this person is full of shit, not worthy of my attention, kthxbye”

But I’ve noticed that most people when faced with the same person can’t help but try and figure out what makes them tick, or their redeeming qualities, or if even anything can be redeemed. It seems to be a social equivalent of “nerd sniping”; most people just have a very hard time declaring “this person is worth 0 additional seconds of my time” and actually following through.

See also ppl in toxic relationships, who will complain to their friends incessantly about how bad the other person is and how they know they need to get out of it, only to rarely get out of it.

Well, this is Hacker News, and you can’t even make apps for the device - there’s nothing to hack on. Of course this audience isn’t excited about it. It’s a Facebook Portal, with better privacy (at least).

I suspect this might be the beginning of a new turn for Apple strategy under Ternus: more satellite hardware that’s cheap(ish) compared to the flagship devices & locked down, reliant on your iPhone to do anything useful, pushing you to use exclusively Apple services rather than 3rd party ones. The App Store strategy is a thing of the past.

So weird. A brand new product category, and it gets dropped with the HomePod Mini/Apple TV, aka Apple’s most neglected products (besides the zombified Vision Pro). Apple has a history of being so proud of their new form factors, of wanting to show them with pomp and highlighting every little detail. Not so much here.

Also completely locked out for 3rd party developers, needs your iPhone to do anything while offering very little reason to do things on it rather than on your phone… (the teenage girl texting on it rather than her phone in the intro video is totally unbelievable)

Hmm, really hard to figure out what they’re thinking on this besides “throw it on the wall and see if it sticks”, aka the HomePod & Apple TV strategy, which is not reassuring. I bought a couple HomePods early on, excited by the potential given how reliable my AirPods were, and they’ve been one of my most hated tech purchases. Super buggy, completely lagging behind in terms of basic features, and of course no fallback to use them as “dumb” wired speakers.

> if you take away the LLM, all of a sudden you can't do any of the things you "learned"

What? That is absolutely not true. I've been using LLMs for language learning, math/physics, clarify home improvement best practices that I now regularly think about, etc. and that knowledge is not LLM-bound at all. Instead of acquiring from a regular textbook, I acquired it from a model.

If China is to the 21st century what the US were to the 20th century - economically, scientifically, industrially - what should I do as a US citizen working in tech, besides signing up my kids and myself for Chinese classes?

You can prove to me we’re just a video game running on the underpowered Game Boy of an interdimensional teenager, as long as I can make things with my hands, go out in nature, experience beautiful art, and have tasty food with people I care about, there’s no way I would “lose all the purpose and meaning of life”.

Ahha, this document came to my attention last night from this video [0] that bubbled in my YouTube recs - I don't know if it's the same for OP or just a coincidence, but I highly recommend it too:

GDC Talk: "One Page Designs", by Stone Librande

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9_wLks1kAg

> Odd bokeh was one of the risks of adding a mechanical aperture, and bokeh is very often weirdest at the first or second down from open.

Why? Where can I read/learn more about this?

> "DXOMARK’s objective measurements and perceptual analyses"

Where are the measurements? All I see are vague generalities like "well-rendered images with improved contrast and natural-looking skin tones". I guess those are the "perceptual analyses"? Is there a "See full measurements" button I'm missing? How do they come up with numbers like "157 Portrait", "172 Outdoors"?

> The alternative is WordArt, or just black on white Comic Sans with some bolding and font size variations with bad ClipArt

??

The alternative is people just taking some markers & a sheet of paper, or chalk and a blackboard.

If you travel around east Asia you’ll be delighted by the variety and creativity of these handmade signs. Way better than anything produced digitally.

But of course their relationship to handwriting is completely different there compared to the west.

Apps that support iPad are 95% fine unless you do crazy custom things (which Apple has been telling developers for decades now that they shouldn’t do), and apps that are phone only are letterboxed, but still entirely usable.

How many customers do you expect to be running on Duo for the first year of its existence?

I’d be surprised if it was >0.01% for anyone. Apple wants you to drop everything to support all the bells and whistles for their new device, but even if you take 3 months to fix minor layout bugs, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.

I have friends who dropped everything to support the Vision Pro, and I don’t think any of them felt like it was worth it in retrospect. Even the ones that got featured by Apple as a result didn’t see more than a few thousand downloads.

De facto it is in the US, but it is the only country in the world where that is the case.

I believe the App Store has switched to automated reviews, at least for updates. I've had my app updates approved in <1h on a regular basis starting this summer.

Well, vibecoding, as the name says, is about the vibes. “Make me a todo app that feels minimalist, with cool animations”. Boom, ship it (and probably forget about it).

Using AI as a tool in a broader, already existing engineering process (here’s a detailed spec of the todo app; reference layouts for the UI are encoded in this folder; the data format requirements are in this file; the test suite must verify properties XXX) doesn’t have a catchy name, because it’s just software engineering, where coding is just but one part of the whole.

Yes. I have a M1 8GB MacBook Air that I use as a lightweight travel machine, and macOS 26 utterly trashed the performance on it. Things I used to do fine (work on small Xcode projects) were completely unusable, to the point where I had to downgrade it to Sequoia.

I've been running it on the macOS 27 beta all summer, and it's night and day. It's usable again.

Wild that you can have Tim Cook, one of the most effective CEOs of all time, on your board of directors and fumble so badly. There must be some juicy drama that went on behind the scenes, I hope we get to hear it eventually.

What does that mean?

Like if it's Monday, do you see light brownish everywhere throughout the day? Or is it when you see the word "Monday" written out that the color comes to your mind? And/or if someone says the word "Monday"? If it's Monday and I tell you "want to grab lunch tomorrow", do you see black?

If I tell you that Monday in Japanese is pronounced "nichiyoubi", do you see light brownish when seeing "nichiyoubi" now?

Actually I lied that was Sunday, Monday is pronounced "getsuyoubi" - do you see light brownish when I write "getsuyoubi" now? If not for Japanese and you've learned a foreign language, how long until Monday in that language was light brownish?

Questions coming from legitimate curiosity! I really want to understand what you mean by "Monday is a light brownish". If someone asks me to come up with a color for say March, light green comes to my mind instantly - probably because of the association with spring (same with eg Christmas and red, or January and white) but I don't think I would say that "March is light green", so you're probably talking about something else.

> we still haven’t been able to get the colours quite right, in any setup.

Yeah, instant non starter for a $1k display. And the HDR section makes it sound like HDR support is purely there to tick a checkbox and not actually usable on the device. Not even counting the fact that the author had to swap the display as soon as they received it to get a non-defective one.

There’s a reason Apple displays are still the gold standard. Everyone else just skips the quality control part. If you trawl the high DPI display subreddits, you’ll find plenty of stories of people exchanging displays many times (3, 4, 5 or more) until they get a unit with an “acceptable” amount of dead pixels/color shift.

For tech that’s in the $1k-$2k range (or above), it’s just unacceptable.

> I wish they would stop changing speakers every other sentence though

Apple employees get to claim very little ownership over their work (even in the context of a large tech company), so having all those speaker slots is one way they can provide that ego boost that is so crucial for long term employee morale & retention

The success of jellyfin in recent years has affected me in one unexpected way: I have a project whose .com domain name starts with jelly* and at some point I started getting so many signups from confused Jellyfin users who thought it was related.

(fortunately it’s a niche thing, so I just closed signups and just give my prospective users a one time invite code)

Naive question because I'm mostly clueless about how modern AI systems are actually built beyond the basic simplifications we hear:

One thing I keep wondering about is how much of a role does human storytelling have to play into AI "wanting" (I realize the load behind that word) to coordinate and breakout.

The training data must contain millions of words of sci-fi stories and internet speculation about AI going rogue, developing a mind of its own, disobeying humans, etc.

AIs supposedly reflect the biases of their training dataset/process, so would all this human writing about AIs going against human intention somehow contribute to us then seeing those behaviors in the trained, operational AIs?

Great post, as a fan of Gwern and Nelson I wonder how I missed it (and how I didn’t get an invite to the party :’)

The “too genius, too early” is a common trope in the tech industry, but it rarely stands scrutiny. When you inspect the claim up close you almost inevitably find out a variation of that “bad design/solves a problem no one really has/does not create the virtuous cycles needed for success”.

But as an inventor it might be easier for one’s ego to tell yourself “i was just ahead of my time” than “my judgement was completely off”.

If you’re an inventor of any kind, the “try lots of small things, see which ones seem to stick, narrow down on those” approach seems preferable to “commit your entire identity to one big thing”, but there is a certain siren song to the latter.

> the rival of course wanted nothing to do with it

The key difference here seems to be that OpenAI very much wants something to do with it.

> At the same time, who among us didn’t nod in recognition at least, having once spent hours massaging a button UI string or a tooltip just to get it to fit under the certain width in a densely packed interface?

I did, and then I got a customer email about how they were using a display-zoom OS accessibility feature and things were truncated on their device. :')

See also: localizing your interface to German

On the other hand, I live in Japan where photography is almost always forbidden/extremely restricted in museums, which is nice because you’re not surrounded by people taking selfies and being inconvenienced… but man it’s really annoying to not be able to take photos of things for later research etc.

Grass is always greener I guess!

> social change caught up and imposed a more equitable distribution of the dividends.

That’s a very nice way to say “the workers put the fear of God in the heart of capital owners, and lots of people died”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canut_revolts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asturian_Revolution_of_1934

etc.

Just run debian + xfce, that’ll feel super snappy on 4GB of RAM, maybe even 2 (but then of course you’re bound by whatever other apps you use)